DES3322

Is about the minimum form required to convey and idea. It teaches design thinking through the construction of furniture. As a cultural object, Furniture is as consistent or evolving as we are in our respective societies.

Ideas will be expressed directly in rough prototypes made quickly with the materials and techniques immediately available. The results may not always be conventionally good-looking, but you will make real & functioning furniture and the methods you will learn will provide you with a powerful context for all other scales of creative planning.

The hardest thing about the creative act is learning how to start something before you know what it is. And, the simplest objects are always more formally complex than the mind can accurately imagine.

You will learn and prototype in cardboard, wood and steel to provide viable structures and combined with other materials to refine the form and intent of your ideas. Craft is important so-far as basic structural usability is attained for each specific project —ideas supersede material “correctness”.

The primary learning goal of des3322 is to understand design thinking through furniture made through directconstruction —a design method intended to minimize abstraction in visualization, compartmentalize failures, and self-validate discovery and iteration. This goal will be achieved through course projects that have been developed to help you connect to ideas beyond the commonly recognized boundaries, and to think about furniture in a larger cultural context.

—Thomas Oliphant taken from DES 3322 - S2023 syllabus

Trestle

“an open cross-braced framework used to support an elevated structure such as a bridge.”

This structure relies on the ideas of juxtaposition, reciprocation and balance. Initially working with a sticklike framework I carried over bends and folds from the original maquettes. They held a dynamic form as one stick brought the backbone of the force while another seemed to be cut and dragged along the axis, pulled from its original form into two separate pieces. The form supported movement and change.

This design decision was prompted by an earlier visit to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Herzog de Mueron. While there I found plentiful examples of abstract geometry that piqued my interest, a particular moment of note was a window next to a beautiful staircase in the administration portion of the building. The angular terminating geometry combined with the massive scale captivated me and inspired me to try my hand with radical forms.

The separation and movement lead one to question, whether they are drifting apart, or potentially toward one another? will they someday reconnect? or will the table grow higher? as if they are two repelling magnets fastened along a diagonal axis about to lift into space.

Bringing these ideas into the final working structure I sought advice from my client - myself. The furniture I could see myself using was a storage system. An artful technique to display items I wanted to “show off” falling the same manner as leaving magazines on our coffee tables.

These trestles serve best as a single-person desk as the two sides allow for the display of public items and a way to discretely obscureW personal assets, with the vertical spine separating one realm from the other.

The backbone support integrates the 3rd axis into the structure providing it with self-supporting strength. Giving each trestle the capability of supporting one plus persons body weight. Building upon the angular intrigue of examples like Gerrit Rietveld’s “Zig Zag Chair” or the incredible minimalism of “Crooked Lounge Chair” by Nazara Lázaro. Only 3 connected planes of simultaneous tension and compression work together support the 8’ by 3’ glass table.

A secondary found function of the trestles is a set of stacked shelves. Due to the construction using flat planes and repeated angles, the trestles can be tipped on their sides to new orientations. As well as stacked in new arrangements to consciously continue or radically break the axes of each individual form.

It’s a beautiful system that hangs in the balance as long as one believes and cares to observe it.

Chair

This pair of chairs explores the motif of personification as well as the spectrum between art and engineering that furniture constantly battles. It is with full awareness that I tell you these chairs had a long journey to become fully realized.

Departing from my trestles, I realized a fascination with geometric logic. But rather than pursuing another abstract angular composition, I wanted to approach a form and ruleset with tangent edges, radii, and “thick” curves. I dreamed of a series of curves with their own logic and languages. During the construction of my first prototype, I fully embraced the allowance of curves, even introducing full circle shapes in cylindrical structural elements of the PVC pipe.

In the curves and whimsical forms, I saw fun, but more importantly, I saw life. The prototype chair was reminiscent of an animal, wandering the wild. The more I looked, sat with it, and on it, the more its personality grew with me. I saw its legs shuffling over the ground, I saw its neck craning, and its eyes peering about curiously.

After iteration, the form was refined. A thinner neck created improved posture with cradling of the spine and simultaneously extreme flexibility for sitting both forward and backward and rotating between. A bar bridging the eyes and lower neck allowed the chair to be easily carried about.

I liked the personality of the chairs so much that I thought each of them should be different, just like animals or people, where no two are the same. Originally set out to create a pair of identical chairs based on templates, I decided to diverge with a miniature at the perfect size to complement a standard “side chair,” after finding the sweet spot through testing with a secondary plywood prototype. All the same templates were employed, but the pieces were cut differently to complement each other, rather than duplicate.

The tall-neck chair follows the standard Western chair dimensions, sitting at just over 16 inches for sitting at the average table height, and supporting the area just under one’s shoulder blades. The shorter neck leans into the small of your back or against the side as an armrest. With a seat at just over 10 inches off the ground, it gives the feeling of sitting on a milk crate or a small stool. Together they create a pair of a chair and an ottoman, or child and parent, depending upon one’s view of these items as furniture or sculpture.

This exploration navigated the area between pragmatism and whimsy. While there were plenty of design decisions that could be adequately “justified,” there also exist many moments that were simply “just for fun.” I believe that there is a spectrum in furniture between art and engineering, and this project gave me the ability to explore both simultaneously in one project.